Adobe ditching Type 1 fonts

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2022-09-21 at 16:39:54 +0100, David Carlisle wrote:

 > On Wed, 21 Sept 2022 at 16:24, Gary Hoffman <glhoffman at gmail.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > But isnÕt the point that you may want to reach the maximum number of
 > > readers? Many have Acrobat Reader and wouldnÕt have a clue where to find an
 > > open source alternative.
 > >
 > > G Hoffman
 > >
 > >
 > >
 > Sure, but for them the only part of the announcement linked at the start of
 > this thread that matters is:
 > 
 > 
 > > No changes are being made to Acrobat. Acrobat will continue handling PDFs
 > in the same manner it has been for more than 20 years:
 > 
 > PDFs with embedded fonts will display as intended.

Fortunately updmap is set up to embed all Type 1 fonts by default for
about two decades.

But doesn't the PDF specification explicitly allow not to embed fonts?
Adobe provided at least the LW35 fonts along with their products in
the past and offered font packages for other languages (CJK for
example) to be downloaded free of charge. 

Though IMO a document which has not all resources embedded cannot be
called "portable", it seems that Adobe violates the PDF specification
here.  

There are many documents out there which have not all fonts embedded.
Most annoying are documents produced by Adobe itself which look ugly
on Linux because fonts are substituted by "similar" fonts with
obviously different metrics.

IMO it was a big mistake to allow not to embed all fonts but it's also
a mistake to deliberately break documents which were created according
to this unfortunate specification. 

Regards,
  Reinhard

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